


What Would Tom Ripley Do?

by likeadeuce



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-16
Updated: 2009-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lilah liked secrets, especially other people's secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Would Tom Ripley Do?

She liked secrets. Other people's, of course. Or rather, Lilah Morgan liked the moment when other people's secrets ceased to be secrets, when she took possession of them, and they became something entirely other – trophies, jewels or, when she needed them, weapons.

To give a small example: the matter of Lindsey McDonald's wardrobe allowance. The summer when they were both student interns at Wolfram and Hart, the swift wings of rumor fluttered through the office, whispering on good authority – someone had talked to someone who made a copy of the paperwork – that Lindsey had put in for an advance on his salary, due to the extenuating circumstance that he needed to purchase corporate attire commensurate with the expectations of Wolfram and Hart clients. A few days of snide comments made the rounds, the farm boy with snobbish pretensions, and then rumor's wings flew on to other, better gossip.

But Lilah didn't. Compared to Lilah, winged rumor was an amateur. Lilah alone bothered to notice that, aside from a few superficial pretensions – French cuffs on his shirts, a new jacket with the same old suit pants – Lindsey's wardrobe (which hadn't been bad in the first place) did not get any larger, or newer. From there, there were only a few simple steps (phone records, yellow pages search, a bottle of Chanel shipped to a nurse at women's health clinic) to find that, on the day the wardrobe allowance was disbursed, Lindsey McDonald had arranged to pay for an abortion in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lilah was further thrilled – and then only momentarily disappointed – when she realized the woman in question was Lindsey's sister. So it probably wasn't quite as sordid as it sounded; the woman had four children and an unemployed husband; this was a good deed by a good brother. Still, Lilah filed the information away in her trophy room. She was willing to bet that the husband didn't know the truth.

Even if he did, if there was no way to use the information as personal blackmail, it had its value, if only because Lindsey had thought it worth lying about. He was a good brother, and he didn't want anybody to know. Concern for his family was a weakness, a potential point of attack. Lindsey would rather have everyone think he couldn't afford his own clothes. An ugly truth could be an accident; liars chose lies with care. A mask revealed more than a face.

Lilah Morgan took great care with her masks.

The story about her mother, for instance, the facts she pretended to let slip. Her mother was in a home, couldn't remember her name or recognize her face. It sounded like a sobstory, the heartless bitch using a doddering old lady to troll for sympathy. It would be nothing, then, for anyone who cared to check up on the story, see if she might have invented it, and from there, to glimpse references not to "senile dementia" or "early-onset Alzheimer's" but "complete psychotic break," "hallucinations," and "extreme paranoia." Then rumor (never idle, always busy) flitted through the office to murmur, "Morgan may be crazy, but at least she comes by it honestly."

Then everyone knew what her lies and omissions were hiding. They never dug any deeper. They were amateurs.

When she got bored – which was often; every day work in mergers and acquisitions, even conducted with the most evil of intentions, hardly offered a full range of stimulating experience for the truly developed mind -- Lilah sometimes took a risk and threw a little bait on the water. There was a particular story she liked to tell about the semester she spent in Florence. "I went there to study art history," she said, "because my father thought a girl should be pretty and useless, if she could afford to." Then, Lilah related, she had discovered the dark genius of Caravaggio, and read all of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley books, and her course as an immoral opportunist was set for life. She had an undergraduate honors thesis in the library at Bryn Mawr, she always added, to prove it.

This was, of course, a foolish lie. For one thing, anyone with a respectable knowledge of Italian art would know that Caravaggio had not been a Florentine painter. She would have been gravely disappointed in any student of the psychology of Lilah Morgan – enemy, lover, or rival – who, after catching her in that lie, did not bother to ascertain that there was in fact, no such thesis and, furthermore, that no one named Lilah Morgan had been enrolled at Bryn Mawr in the late eighties, early nineties, or, indeed, ever.

From there it was only a few steps to discover that Bryn Mawr did have an art history program at the Florence Institute, that the 1988 class did include a student named Lilah Morgan. However, she had been on exchange from the University of Pittsburgh, where she had presented a thesis, not on Caravaggio, the dark master, but on "Representations of the Sublime in the Early Works of Raphael" (The sublime in Raphael? Those darling little angels on Valentine's cards and calendars sold to teen girls and old women? Lilah Morgan?) Furthermore, a little digging would show that Lilah Morgan had grown up in Pittsburgh, where her father had been assistant foreman at a steel mill, before dying in an on-the-job accident when Lilah was seven – too early, presumably, to advise her to flit off to Italy and be useless. Lilah had attended public schools, gone to Pitt on scholarship, and apparently lucked into the Florence program, since her grades didn't seem to merit it. Records also confirmed that her only living relative was a mother, residing in a medical facility in Los Angeles.

And so, a clever student of Lilah Morgan ought to discover, the ambitious young lawyer had padded her resume a bit, told some trivial lies about her expertise and academic record. It hardly mattered (a bar association might frown, but the firm had found its way around far greater inconsistencies). Still, Lilah, with all her air of money and East Coast privilege– didn't she walk around like one of the Morgans who invented Wall Street? It was a chink in her armor. She knew they would find out and, the day that Gavin Park sidled up to her in the copy room and said, "How about those Steelers?" she knew he had connected the dots. Lilah just glared, and stormed off, leaving Gavin to smile with his double-Stanford superiority, and plan to tell everyone what he had learned.

And once Lilah rounded the corner, away from Gavin, she smiled, because she knew she had won. Winged rumor had discovered her mystery and would dig no further.

That spring in Florence, she really had read all those Highsmith books; years later, she still re-read her favorites, still asked, sometimes, what would Tom Ripley do? When she mentioned Ripley – forger, impersonator, identity thief – it should have been a clue. If any of them really listened.

There was a girl in Florence that spring named Lilah Morgan. It just hadn't been her. They'd been friends, in the way not-yet-Lilah still had them then. They'd even fucked a few times, because they were both pretty and bored. Then the term had ended and the girl-who-wasn't-Lilah yet went back to Bryn Mawr.

Not that she had, in true Ripley fashion, beaten her friend to death with an oar and dumped her on a Mediterranean beach. No, the other girl, the one from Pittsburgh, was alive and well. It was just that she had married an Italian, stayed in Florence, become a citizen, and not needed her American social security number any more. The Bryn Mawr girl had always liked that name, Lilah (her own was Beatrice, for the girl in her father's favorite poem. Her father who did tell her to fly off and be useless and she had listened, because those were days when fathers were always right, and useless pretty Beatrice was always her father's girl.)

She remembered the name, years later, when she needed a new one. Now she was Lilah and there was only a crazy old woman to say differently. Tom Ripley, she was certain, would have approved.

Lilah liked keeping secrets.


End file.
